Early Adopter Grief: Google Video and Yahoo Buzz Bite the Dust

Early adopters are having a hard time with the lives of their early favorite apps lately. Two deaths are hitting me where I live right now:

The first one is Google Video. I got an email from Google, letting me know that I needed to download all my old videos and find a new home for them by April 29th:

Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.

On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.

Thank you for being a Google Video user.

Today, the news hit that Yahoo will be “sunsetting” Yahoo Buzz. On the Buzz website: “Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations. We appreciate your patronage. The Yahoo! Buzz Team.”

This comes along with the death of MyBlogLog and a variety of other services in the Yahoo family that I don’t remember ever using.

Why I Liked These Services

Google Video, at its inception, was one of the only services on the web that placed almost no constrictions on how it hosted your video. The way it converted from just about any codec is unmatched (adjusted for “codec inflation”) in any service to this day, including its successor YouTube.

Up until recently, you still couldn’t do all the things with YouTube you used to be able to do with Google Video, including upload videos of any length, and easily export any video as a user (not a producer) direct to MP4, enabling the use of your videos as an iTunes or RSS podcast feed.

Incidentally, the death of Google video may precipitate my move away from the service to a non Google video hosting solution, since they still haven’t upgraded my personal account to something that allows for longer video sizes.

As for Yahoo Buzz, I’ve got a lingering attachment to it because it was the first time I’d seen the idea of Digg implemented correctly for the masses. It was structured in such a way that it could service thousands (if not millions) of content sources while still providing both massive traffic for publishers (and I do mean MASSIVE) as well as a good user experience.